Transatlantic Fiction, Transatlantic Readers:
The Audience for the Novel in the US and Britain 1750-1860

Panel proposal for Reception Study Society Conference, Kansas City, MO, 9/27
- 9/29/2007

        The audience for the novel in English in the period 1750-1860 was
global, a result of the Anglophonic diaspora around the Atlantic basin. Yet
it remains to be demonstrated whether and how this fact influenced
individual writers or how best to understand the ways geography, nation,
gender, race, and class produced specific communities of readers-and to what
extent such communities for Anglophonic novels could be considered
transnational.

        We are looking for papers that explore the reception of the novel in
English from a transatlantic perspective. We are especially interested in
papers that examine the hermeneutics of specific audiences or that challenge
our understanding of the audience for the novel in English when considered
in a transatlantic context. Finally, it is our intention to bring work by
scholars of British and American literature into dialogue with another,
transcending thereby the borders that exist between scholars of the novel in
the period of its rise and maturation on all sides of the Atlantic. Topics
could include (but are not limited to):

. The reception of specific works and/or authors from a transnational
perspective
. The audience for sentimental/domestic fiction (or other subgenres)
across national borders
. The emergence of the transnational audience for highbrow or literary
fiction in English
. The role of anthologies and republication in shaping a transatlantic
audience
. How did novels negotiate existing discourses that disparaged fiction
and its writers and readers?
. Class and the transatlantic audience for the novel
. Gender and the transatlantic audience for the novel
. Marketplace and audience: the marketing of fiction in the
transatlantic world
. Transatlantic literary criticism
. How particular novels constructed and instructed their audiences,
encoding within themselves the hermeneutic strategies demanded of them
. The rivalry among British and American authors
. Trans-Atlantic history of the book
. Did novels identify themselves with or for a particular class or for
gendered audiences? How did audiences respond to such strategies?

Please submit (via email) an abstract and CV by April 26 to:

Dr. Michael Davey
Associate Professor
Department of English
Valdosta State University
Valdosta, GA 31698
mjdavey_at_valdosta.edu
229-263-1419

The Reception Study Society (RSS) seeks to promote informal and formal
exchanges between scholars in several related fields: reader-response
criticism and pedagogy, reception study, history of reading and the book,
audience and communication studies, institutional studies, and feminist,
black, ethnic, gay, postcolonial, religious, and other studies.

http://copland.udel.edu/~pgold/webpage/RSSsite/index.html

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Received on Wed Apr 04 2007 - 16:53:35 EDT